Inside Cathy’s 'Wuthering Heights' House with Margot Robbie ｜ Set Tour ｜ Architectural Digest)

Hello, AD, and welcome to the Wuthering Heights Movie Set Tour. We have a very grand staircase, as any grand manor should have, and ours is unique because we have red fur lining the underside of it, which I've personally never seen, ever. And I think I'm going to do a big dramatic crying scene on this staircase. I'm going to take you through to the dining room where we can meet Susie, our production designer. Hello, Susie. Hey, Margot. Welcome to the dining room. This is our gorgeous table. And of course, the dollhouse. So the doll's house is basically where we started off So that is a perfect replica of the room that we're standing in right now. Even to the point that there is a little doll's house in there, the way there is in this room. How extraordinary. And then there's a doll's house in there. There's a doll's house in that, and another one in that, and another one in that. Look at the Worshper doll. So whenever we see Bubbles, Bubbles has her own chair, and we wanted to feel that she was very welcome in this family. We've even got miniature Bubbles. There is a miniature Bubbles. She's having a little sleep at the moment on that chair. Tiny Bubbles and a little tiny Bubbles chair. Yeah, I think that might be Bubbles' real hair. And I think my favorite thing about the room is how it looks like there's really beautiful condensation, like the walls are sweating, but in a very beautiful way. So we found these lovely plastic, very contemporary baubles, half spheres. And we got a selection of different sizes and put them a very Regency style and then twisted them up. So we've used contemporary materials in a traditional way wherever possible. And then we had the idea that the wall had started to sweat. The whole film has a feel of moisture throughout it. So this is like posh moisture, and it drips down from the panels onto the floor on occasions. You're wet. I am not. So we've had a fantastic food economist who has helped design and come up with all the recipes and ideas, along with Emerald, as to what our character is going to eat. Can I give you your wedding present? So I think this is our mushroom soup. Kind of autumnal set dressing. At Christmastime, it's all different, or every meal is different. We did a big fish banquet with all the jellied seafood. Delicious. Yeah, it's all about the aesthetic. It's not about what we're eating practically. It's just gorgeous to look at. Jelly has been quite a theme though, hasn't it? Yeah, we found we can suspend many things in jelly. So hands are a bit of a theme in Thrust Across Grange, and we've created our own ceiling roses. And then we've got these beautiful chandeliers in each room. Where possible, we're using real candles. They're double-wicked to give a little extra punch in the light. And it's the same with all the fires, they're practical wherever possible. The special effects guys have put in a special flue system in each studio so we can have real fires, which gives a lovely light. So you're in the entrance hall now. So we have a trompe l'oeil on the floor, which is a painted representation of the garden of Thrust Across Grange. We were going to have it on one of the walls. And then when we decided on the different effects in each room, it became like, we're never going to see a trompe l'oeil. But we realised that we had a spare floor. So it's on the floor now, and it's in a beautiful gold, hand-painted. We had some amazing artists come in and paint it for us. So our staircase here leads up, by the magic of film, to a massive suite of rooms. Your bedroom. Here, look. In this Regency house, we decided each interior of the panel will be a different texture or fabric. So we've got the quartz crystal in the blue room, red velvet in the hallways, silver walls with the droplets in the dining room. We've got the skin room, which is Cathy's bedroom. We have a gainaged room, which is when fabric is wrapped over each panel and stretched. A pleated purple room for Isabella. And then we have Cathy's dressing room, which is silk with jewels. And it looks like a big pair of pants dressed from the ceiling. Like everyone else who stepped onto these sets, I was just astounded by how beautiful they are and magical and how completely transported I felt. And I just went straight back to Jacob and said, you're going to have to work harder because for Cathy to choose Heathcliff over all this, I mean, he's got to be quite a guy. These sets are probably the craziest film sets I've ever seen in my whole life. You walk in here and I'm like, that's I want to live here. I want to see it on screen and live it again and again and again. It's the best. I think, yeah, I think having the inside outside helps, doesn't it? Yes, it's completely composite set. So very rarely do you get to do the outside on the inside on the same sound stage. It's so true. Normally you're on location, then you open the door, cut to three weeks later, you're in studio and you open the door and you're in that house. But here we just walk in and out all together. And I think there's also being in a sound studio whilst being outside is also funny and surreal and also a specific device, I think, in Emerald's storytelling as well, like the stillness of Thrushcross Grange. My character's bedroom, Cathy's bedroom, the skin room, which is going to sound really weird, but it's her skin on the walls, the floor. Everything is designed to look like Cathy's skin. It's beautifully described in the script. So when you read that sort of description as a design, you're like, bring it. Come on, let's get this. And on a previous film that I'd worked with Emerald, I knew that she was really into tactile materials. And we had some latex in the office and we had a skin tone latex. And I was like, this, there's something in this. And then we took photocopies of Margot's arm and I just laid it over the top and realised there was an opaqueness to the latex. So we developed the photocopy on and printed that onto some stretchy fabric, padded the fabric and then lay the latex over the top. And before you know it, it is this perfect representation of visuals. We're doing lots of senses. I sort of want to have smelly vision, smell-o-vision, scratch and sniff, textures, moisture, that all the senses are going to get wound up in this film. And this skin room definitely does that. Welcome to the blue room. It's blue. It's our drawing room. So this is our crystal walls with an ombre silk underneath. So Bubbles, whose character name in the movie is Pamela and is, to quote the script, the smallest dog you've ever seen, has a little chair. Wherever we sit, Bubbles has a chair as well or a swing. Every window opens smoothly like a sash window. It's supposed to do. We have some scenes where we're going to have the billowing voiles. So every window along the front of the house has this aspect to it as well. We're just not really restricted by the sets in the way that you normally are. The fact that you can walk to a window and open it on a set actually doesn't ever really happen. And obviously we've got the backdrops here of Yorkshire. I mean, those are actual pictures of wars. And obviously just blown up humongous. With lighting, it can kind of shift to look like different times a day. So it's a high res image that we then manipulated of the actual location we're going to be filming in. And we stitched it together to get the sort of 360 vibe and then created pockets of weather in certain areas so we can highlight or low light those elements. We are in the gardens of Thrushcross Grange. My favorite set of all times, these gardens. We're standing on real grass. When you walk in, the smell of roses hits you because there are real flowers everywhere. These trees are probably one of my favorite things about it because on the other side of the Thrushcross Grange wall, there's one tree growing over the fence. These trees are growing towards each other like lovers who are kept apart. Very descriptive script that Emerald writes was very clear that it needed to be a composite set. And that was also one of her first things that she said to me. We're building the world on a soundstage. That whole old school, traditional form of filmmaking. But let's do it in a contemporary manner. So we got the biggest soundstage as we could at this studio. And to make it composite, we had to come up with a balance between how much we can build in the house and how much we can create in the garden. Hence why we've got terraces which give us ideas of gardens going on. And we have hidden sort of avenues and vistas on the sides of the house just to give the impression that the house garden and the house carries on behind us as well. The script required me to create a little element of the moorland when Cathy tries to climb in and have a peek at what's going on. And that helps with deciding how we build the shape. And the whole of this set is all about even numbers. So everything's very symmetrical and regular here. Whereas over in the heights, it's all nothing's the same. Everything's slightly wonky. Whereas here, we're really strict with our lines. From a producer point of view, you're like, oh, we should shoot on location. It would be cheaper than building these insane sets. But you just want the most amazing, beautiful thing. You also just, I think as a producer, just want to have everyone really dream big. And then you figure out, OK, how do we actually practically do it? Last week, it was snowing here. It was completely, you know, Thrush Cross Grange was covered in snow. Movie snow, of course, which is tiny little pieces of paper. But it was the most beautiful, magical thing you've ever seen. My first day here, it was springtime, summer version. And it's Christmas time. We do all the snow dressing and everyone's redressing it back now. But there's meant to be a juxtaposition, like Susie mentioned, between Thrush Cross and our Wuthering Heights set. The conditions over at Wuthering Heights is a lot more blustery, harsh wind and rain in your face. And here is almost like a soundstage stillness to it. It's just impossibly beautiful, no matter what the season is at Thrush Cross Grange. The swing is actually based on an amazing, famous painting by Fragonard of a young woman having the joyous time of swinging in an exact replication of what we've done here. So it was really fun to play with that. That was sort of like the beginning of the inspiration for the rest of the garden, really, this corner. We did a great scene, Alison and I, on the swing there. He is the most handsome man I ever met. It's just the most magical little corner of all the sets. I love it. The script was fantastic. It gave me good pointers, but also the fact that I knew it was going to be represented as a doll's house. So I almost designed a doll's house and then the full scale version rather than the other way around. So we've got these massive windows that are the complete opposite to what's at the heights. So these tall, narrow portrait style windows, as opposed to the landscape that we have at the heights. Honestly, we'd been shooting on the Wuthering Heights set for weeks and I came over here and I was like, I don't want to go back, which is very good for my character, actually. When you see the Wuthering Heights set too, you can appreciate it almost like lives and breathes and the landscape encroaches in on the set in a way that's just fascinating and artistic and cool. But it's quite harsh. It's a lot of brutalist sort of elements and it's a lot darker. And of course, when you come to these sets, everything's so bright and it's just meant to be a great juxtaposition. Emil's very keen to have this boundary around us to push out any reality. So anything that's living is caged or, you know, in something. So we've got the goldfish, I think we've got a bird's cage. Everything's caged and even the garden feels caged apart from that tree that's making a dash for it. We just had live goldfish in it. It was unbelievable. It was so cool. Yeah. Like Susie said, everything is caged and symbolic for Cathy's life here as well. And the fish and the jelly. I mean, everything's kind of suspended in a beautiful way, but it is caged. But of course, we don't have the goldfish here right now. We had it under special conditions. Because, yeah, by the way, there's a certain temperature. The real diva of this movie, the goldfish, I have to say. I almost never do contemporary films because I want to be in a different world. And when you're doing a period film, you just feel like you're transported to a different place. And we're not, obviously, this isn't a period correct film in that we stuck to all the rules using contemporary materials like resin, but like a period correct silhouette is kind of extends to the costumes where we're using materials that aren't period correct, but the silhouettes are. And, you know, it's fun. But it's also actually more difficult to pull off because the options become just kind of infinite. You have to start giving yourself rules. Otherwise, then the world really is as big as your imagination. And you've got so many imaginations at play. It's like it's easy, I think, to do a period correct film where it's just like this is how it was. Zips didn't exist. That material didn't exist. Couldn't be put together like that. And you just do it how it was. But in the Wuthering Heights that we're creating, the options are kind of limitless. Thanks for visiting us today at Thrushcross Grange. And we hope you enjoy seeing these sets on the big screen when the movie comes out. Bye.